'Nothing more sinister than a grainy video'

The fact that Osama bin Laden is issuing threats instead of implementing terror attacks suggests that the war on al-Qaeda has been more successful than most people imagined, writes Con Coughlin

Not so much the October surprise as September remembered. Or September 11, 2001, to be precise. For weeks Democrats have been wondering aloud whether the Bush camp might use the final month of the presidential election campaign to reveal that Osama bin Laden, the architect of the devastating 9/11 attacks had been finally apprehended.

The Democrats, after all, were the original target of the October Surprise conspiracy theory when in 1980 Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate, accused the then President Jimmy Carter of trying to negotiate a secret deal to secure the release of the American embassy hostages held in Iran days before Americans went to the polls.

More recently security officials have been publicly worrying whether bin Laden was planning to revisit the scene of the most devastating terrorist attack of modern times, by carrying out what the IRA used to call a "spectacular" on the American mainland.

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Just how much impact bin Laden's tape will have on voting intentions at this late stage in the election campaign will be revealed in the early hours of Wednesday morning when the exit polls reveal the identity of the likely victor. With President Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic challenger, running almost neck and neck in the polls, any intervention that sways voters either way could be decisive.

American intelligence analysts yesterday said that they believed that this latest tape, the first to feature bin Laden himself for more than a year, was recorded last Sunday. The tape was dropped at the main gate of Al-Jazeera's office in the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. Ahmed Zaidan, Al-Jazeera's bureau chief, is personally known to bin Laden and he has met him several times both before and since the September 11 attacks. After the tape was delivered, the bureau received a call from a satellite telephone asking whether it had been safely received. The tape was 18 minutes long, but only between 13 and 14 minutes were broadcast. "It was just camera positioning and so on that was left out," said a spokesman.

Unlike previous tapes where bin Laden is dressed in camouflage fatigues and is brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle, on this occasion he is dressed in traditional Arabic dress and is reading from a lectern.

British intelligence officials last night confirmed that they had no doubts that the tape was authentic, and said that the tape would be studied in forensic detail for any clues it might provide about bin Laden's whereabouts or his state of mind.

The basic gist of bin Laden's latest contribution is that the American people have not learned their lesson from the 9/11 attacks and, as a consequence, should prepare themselves for more of the same. Advising them on how to "avoid another Manhattan", bin Laden provides the rather bizarre example of "why we did not attack Sweden", the answer being that Sweden had not done anything to impinge upon the freedoms of bin Laden and his followers. As for the Americans, "we fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security, we squander yours."

He goes on to criticise the "American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon". Bin Laden claims that "as I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust in the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our women and children."

If taken at face value, this statement would suggest that bin Laden had been planning the 9/11 attacks since Israel's 1982 aerial bombardment of Beirut. It is the first time that bin Laden has sought to give a justification for the 9/11 attacks.

Bin Laden also criticises President Bush for not acting fast enough to save the lives of those trapped in the twin towers. "It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers."

There is, though, an unmistakeable air of petulance in bin Laden's commentary, a sense of frustration that the world is not taking his threats with sufficient seriousness. "I'm surprised by you," bin Laden admonishes Americans. "Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened."

The very fact that bin Laden is merely issuing threats, rather than implementing terror attacks, suggests that the war on terror has been more successful than most people imagined in disrupting al-Qaeda's infrastructure and effectiveness. Even if bin Laden himself remains at large, many of his key lieutenants have either been captured or killed, and bin Laden now lives a peripatetic existence thanks to the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Certainly this is a fact that the Bush camp will seek to emphasise in the belief that it should reaffirm their candidates' credentials as a war-time commander with the courage to confront his enemies.